- grand opera released his emotions and helped free him from conventional forms and meters of his earliest conventional poems, short stories, and sketches

W o r k :

- a bridge figure connecting the era of N. Hawthorne and H. D. Thoreau to that of M. Twain and H. James

- pointed to the open road of modernist form, vision, and experiment

- worshipped boldness, contradiction, and change, shocked with his candour about sexuality

- created a radical poetry voicing a radical consciousness: the most ardent of nationalists of the ‘democratic America’

< R. W. Emerson’s “The Poet”:

‘I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not with sufficient plainness or sufficient profoundness address ourselves to life...We have yet had no genius in Am., with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods...’

‘Poet as a seer and namer of things: makes sense of the world. The poet gives power to things which ‘makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and tongues into every dumb and inanimate object.’

‘Through that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form.’

L e a v e s o f G r a s s , 1 s t e d i t i o n (1855):

- the cover did not incl. his name, revealed his identity only when stating: ‘Walt Whitman, An American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, / Disorderly, fleshy and sensual.’